David Allen | Marc Orchant | Ram | Andrew Hoxsey

Think there aren't enough hours in a day? Then you haven't met the devotees of GTD.
Marc Orchant had tried just about everything in his quest to keep pace with life's demands. His garage was filled with old Franklin planners and day timers. A self-described "gadget freak" and early tech adopter, he had explored various kinds of software for mind-mapping, brainstorming, and otherwise jamming 48 hours into 24. "I was constantly trying to find a way to stay on top of all the stuff in my life," says Orchant.

Nothing really satisfied him until early 2001, when he went to work for a software developer in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was given two things on his first day: a key to get in the front door and a copy of Getting Things Done, a book written by consultant and executive coach David Allen. The company's president had attended an Allen seminar and had come away "completely captivated by how natural, logical, and consistent the methodology was," Orchant recalls.

Subtitled The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, Allen's book opens with a clarion call to the frazzled, keyed-up masses across the business spectrum: "It's possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a relaxed sense of control," Allen writes. GTD, as it is called by its devotees, offers "a coherent set of behaviors and tools that function effectively at the level at which work really happens," a system that will "maintain control over hundreds of new inputs daily."
Workers of the world, meet GTD.

At the time, Orchant didn't know that Allen's tome would radically change his life or that he would be part of a fast-growing army of GTDers who credit Allen for increasing their work output, bringing them success in work and life, and unleashing energy and creativity that they never knew before.

"It's as powerful a tool as any I've ever seen," says Andrew Hoxsey, owner and operator of the Napa Wine Company in Oakville, California. "I have done things I just couldn't have done without the methodology." Kim Hagerty, chairman of Michigan­-based Hagerty Insurance and CEO of the Hagerty Group, its management group, calls GTD "an amazing system, and not just an organizational system. It's a lifestyle change as much as anything else."

Followers of Allen, who speak a language of RAM Dumps, Next Actions, Weekly Reviews, 43 Folders, 10,000-Foot Views, and Open Loops, say the GTD effect isn't limited to individuals; numerous small and large companies have also been transformed by Allen's teachings. At General Mills, where about 2,000 employees have volunteered for GTD training, chief learning officer Kevin­ Wilde says GTD has become part of the cereal giant's culture.

"Lots of people really benefit from it," says Wilde. "It gives you more tools to handle this crazy life. Some people have come back from individual training and said they want their team or their whole division to go through it. This approach doesn't reduce your workload, but you're working on better things in better ways."

At Hagerty Insurance, about one-third of the almost 300 employees have adopted GTD, with more to follow suit. "Implementing GTD throughout the organization has increased our productivity and reduced the general stress level," says Hagerty. And at the smaller end of the scale, all 30 employees at Orchant's company, VanDyke Software, have attended a GTD seminar. "It's a core part of our culture, built into the molecular level of every conversation we have," says Orchant, who also runs a GTD blog at www.officezealot.com/gtd.

When asked what draws people and companies to GTD, Allen cites both positive and negative reasons. Some people just want to make life better - get more done, leave work earlier, realize more of their potential. More often, he says, GTD throws a lifeline to people drowning in a sea of stress. Someone gets downsized, changes jobs, gets divorced, or lands a big promotion.

"They're suddenly feeling buried," says Allen. "Many of them are control freaks suddenly out of control. They girded their entrepreneurial loins and marched out into the world. Now they're successful, but it's grown beyond their ability to control it."
That's where GTD comes in.

What is Getting Things Done? We'll get to that in a moment, but first, why Getting Things Done? Why does it need to exist? In a nutshell, the Allen methodology rests on three key insights about "stuff," the nature of work today, and the way the mind operates.

Stuff, for Allen, is the Great Enemy, the Lord of the Flies. As he puts it in Getting Things Done, stuff is "anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step."

That's a big butterfly net, sweeping in, well, almost everything: a $20 million real estate deal, a sore elbow, an elderly parent's need for care, a squeaky garage door, an unanswered e-mail, an invitation to join a church softball team, a dissatisfied customer,­ a cluttered closet, a burgeoning waistline, a monster deadline, a wilting houseplant. And stuff never stops: While you're reading this article, stuff steals into your life from 100 roads: e-mail, cell phone, frowns from your boss, overnight mail, oil-change reminders, sticky notes left on your computer monitor, please-help letters from your kid's school, postponed doctor visits.

The stuff invasion may be worse for the millions whom Allen calls knowledge workers, a term coined by management guru Peter Drucker. That's because, instead of performing the kind of cut-and-dried tasks common to our forebears - chopping down trees, handling the switchboard, bolting on door frames at the Ford plant - today's knowledge worker must define the work before doing it.

Improve communications with personnel - how? Refine that legal brief - how? Get in on booming Chinese markets - how? And while you're defining the work and trying to do it, the hyperlinked, overconnected world keeps banging on your cubicle walls.

"With all the interruptions, e-mails, and calls coming in, you never actually get a solid­ hour to work on something," says GTD fan David Baillie, environmental director, Naval Weapon Station Seal Branch, California. His thought is echoed by Michael Hyatt, president and CEO of Christian book publisher Thomas Nelson.

"To be successful today requires being good at multitasking," says Hyatt. "Things appear with little or no context and you have to impose order on a fairly chaotic environment. The GTD system does that without getting in the way."

To make matters even more difficult, our own minds conspire against us. "The mind is great for having ideas, but not for holding on to them," Allen likes to say. The moment the mind senses the approach of stuff- the forgotten phone call, the broken patio gate, the looming meeting with its hazy agenda - it immediately stores the info on a chunk of your psychic RAM, then sets about making sure you never forget. Never.

But you're thinking, Huh? I do forget. A lot.

No, you don't forget. You just remember at the wrong time. As Allen says, the mind knows nothing of past or present or context or timing. It just knows that you should be doing something right now, all the time, about all this stored-up stuff. So you remember the oil change - when you're teeing off. You remember the unfinished PowerPoint presentation - at three a.m. The mind, bold creator of philosophy and politics, elegant designer of cathedrals and rockets, is no better than a drunken monkey when it's forced to act as a reminder system juggling 300 pieces of stuff. Hence the ­Allen mantra: "If it's on your mind, it's probably not getting done."

That's why GTD begins with getting things off your mind through a RAM dump or mind sweep. When he attended his first Allen seminar in the late 1980s, Andrew Hoxsey was told to write down all of his "incompletions" before the second day of class. He started writing in the afternoon. And writing. And writing...

"There I was in the hotel, so wrapped up in the process," Hoxsey recalls. "It's midnight, and I'm still working through these open loops. My wife said, 'Turn out the light!' So I went in the bathroom and sat there until the sun came up, writing down all these things I hadn't collected anywhere else. It was such a catharsis."

A full-fledged RAM dump, performed in the office or at home, requires hauling out all the stuff that's choking your psychic RAM and getting it into one collection point - a desktop in-box, for example. If it's a conference invitation, toss it in. Confusing memo from a VP? In. Training-film script you promised to critique last year? In. If the stuff isn't physical (e.g., you need to find a new site for the family reunion), write "find site for reunion" on a piece of paper and put it in. Same thing if the stuff is too big or bulky, like that file drawer filled with Clinton-era invoices. Write "review and purge invoices" and add it to the stack.

You'll notice that GTD, starting with the mind sweep, makes little distinction between work life and life life. Again, neither does the mind. That's why we think about ski trips during meetings and think about quarterly reviews while we're on the slopes. Splitting a river into two artificial streams makes little sense; we need to deal with the river as it is.

In his executive-coach role, Allen has sat beside many a CEO or top manager and gently forced them to face up to a staggering number of open loops. He has seen people take six hours just to gather placeholders for all the things on their minds.

"After you've done a mind sweep, everything is captured," says Hagerty. "Then there's this wave of panic and relief. Panic because you have so much to do. Relief that it's all in the right place. Nothing is lurking in the box that's going to come up and bite you. It's an amazing kind of peace."

That peace is part of what Allen, who earned a black belt in karate, calls "mind like water" - the ready state of the martial artist, poised and stress-free. "Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax," he writes in Getting Things Done. If your psychic RAM is overloaded, you're not relaxed and ready for the next minicrisis. You may overreact, underreact, or run screaming down the hall.

As each open loop is discovered, the RAM-dumping newbie must make a decision: What is to be done with this? If closing the loop requires two minutes or less (call Bob, skim letter, make dental appointment), do it immediately. If the loop requires more than two minutes (hire assistant, plan London trip), it's a project for which a successful outcome and next actions must be determined (review résumés, narrow down choices, schedule three interviews for next week).

Question: Can I just slip stuff back into the in-box without deciding?
Answer: no.

"Getting 'in' to 'zero'?" is part of the Allen Grail. Refusing to decide is a major stress builder. Decide, act, move on.

Once all incompletes are on the table, Allen says, most people discover that they have 30 to 100 projects requiring anywhere from 120 to 200 next actions. This is how GTD converts overwhelming stuff into something you can actually do. "Spend more time with spouse" is a vague project; "go biking together next Saturday morning" is an action step.

"The system turns the amorphous nature of work into something like crunching widgets," says Eric Hubbard, president of Ravenswood Bank in Chicago and a longtime GTD devotee. "There's a sense of completion. I define the work once a week or so, and through the week I crunch the widgets."

Much else is involved in the Allen system, as detailed in Getting Things Done and in a later book, Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Life and Work. This includes tickler systems, various suggestions for lists, calendar rules, 50,000-foot views, good ideas for filing. A useful workflow chart can be found at www.davidco.com. But one of the most critical elements, according to Allen and many of his followers, is the weekly­ review, a time set aside to get "clean, clear, current, and complete." You can do another (much shorter) RAM dump. Process notes you've taken. Review and revise task lists. Add things, drop things, or move them to a Someday/Maybe list. If commitments and action steps aren't reviewed periodically,­ Allen warns, the dogged mind will again start trying to remember and remind. Then you'll be back to mind like gravy, plagued by those three a.m. shoulda-dones.

"If you're not doing a weekly review, you're not doing GTD," says Orchant, who favors Friday afternoons for his reviews. "On the surface level, you're just tidying up, and it has value for that alone. But it's also training, trying to get to black belt level. You're constantly trying to refine your ability to make good agreements with yourself and others. This is an opportunity to see how well you did."

Of course, nothing works for everyone. And no doubt scores of people have jumped off the GTD train for one reason or another. But again and again, GTD devotees praise its power to drive personal and corporate changes. "When I'm on my game and everything is where it should be, I come up with the [craziest] out-of-the-box things that turn out to be really good for the business," says Hoxsey. At General Mills, Wilde sees productivity gains flowing from GTD. "I've heard that people feared or ducked certain projects in the past because they didn't break it down to that next simple action. They say, 'Now that I've defined the project and know what success looks like, I can take the first step.'?"

David Baillie says GTD has been great for him as a manager and a supervisor. "Communication is so crisp and clear and prompt," he notes. "People have started using some of the same thought patterns. Now, we don't have a meeting without defining the successful outcome and asking who's got the next action."

Publisher Michael Hyatt observes another change wrought by GTD: a dramatic drop in his tolerance for the hopelessly disorganized. "It drives me crazy," he confesses.­ "I had to terminate a few high-profile people who would commit to something in a meeting and then just wouldn't follow through, so it was a colossal waste of everyone's time."

Orchant, who calls GTD “a phenomenal piece of mental artistry,” credits GTD for his ability to handle a demanding full-time job, write four blogs, do a podcast show, and enjoy life with his wife and kids. He disdains talk of an Allen “cult,” preferring to refer to GTD as “a whole-life discipline.”

“I can’t imagine going back to that restless pursuit of ‘How do I get it together?’?” he says. “I have it together. And when I don’t, I know how to get it back together. And that’s about as good as it gets.”
TWO KEYS TO GTD
1. Capture all the things that need to get done — whether it be now, later, someday, big, little, or in between — into a logical and trusted system outside of your head and off your mind.

2. Discipline yourself to make front-end decisions about all of the “inputs” you let into your life so you will always have a plan for “next actions” that you can implement or renegotiate at any moment.
From Getting Things Done by David Allen. To learn more, go to www.davidco.com.

CHRIS TUCKER